Categories: Fiction

LIFE AND POLITICAL REALITY

₹291.27 M.R.P.:₹ 399.00 You Save: ₹107.73  (27.00% OFF)
<p>Born in 1953 in Old Dhaka, Shahidul Zahir published only six works in his short life – but these are some of the most unique and powerful works of fiction to have come out of the subcontinent. With his own particular blend of surrealism, folklore, oral storytelling traditions, magic realism, a searing understanding of social and political reality, and rare clarity of vision, he created a truly extraordinary oeuvre.</p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Life and Political Reality is the work that established his reputation and granted him cult status in Bangladesh. It examines the 1971 war and its aftermath; a treatise on liberation, and the destruction of the idealism and spirit of post-war Bangladesh, told in a single, corrosive, stream-of-consciousness paragraph.</span><br></p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Abu Ibrahim’s Death is a quieter companion novella, but one that is equally concerned with idealism and compromise, as it studies with deep empathy and nuance the fall of its titular protagonist.</span><br></p><p><span style="font-size: 1rem;">Together, these two novellas make for a superb introduction to a truly brilliant shooting star in the literary firmament of Bangladesh and the world.</span><br></p>

Everything the Light Touches: A Novel

₹599.25 M.R.P.:₹ 799.00 You Save: ₹199.75  (25.00% OFF)
<p>In Everything the Light Touches we meet many travellers: Shai, a young Indian woman who journeys to India’s northeast and rediscovers, through her encounters with indigenous communities, ways of living that realign and renew her. Evelyn, an Edwardian student at Cambridge who, inspired by Goethe’s botanical writings, embarks on a journey seeking out the sacred forests of the Lower Himalayas. Linnaeus, botanist and taxonomist, who famously declared God creates; Linnaeus organizes” and led an expedition to Lapland in 1732. And Goethe himself, who travelled through Italy in the 1780s, formulating his ideas for a revelatory text that called for a re-examination of our propensity to reduce plants – and the world – into immutable parts.</p><p>Drawing richly from scientific ideas, the novel plunges into a whirl of ever-expanding themes, and the contrasts between modern India and its colonial past, urban life and the countryside, capitalism and centuries-old traditions of generosity and gratitude, script and “song and stone.” At the heart of the book lies a tussle between different ways of seeing – those that fix and categorize, and those that free and unify.</p><p>Everything the Light Touches brings together, with startling and playful novelty, people and places that seem, at first, removed from each other in time and place. Yet all is resonance, we discover; all is connection.</p><div><br></div>

THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD - A Novel

₹439.12 M.R.P.:₹ 499.00 You Save: ₹59.88  (12.00% OFF)
<p>In the year 1952, Kalu escaped Banjhan Kalan in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur for Bedford in the British Midlands, hoping to find a life of dignity that he had be<span style="color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: &quot;Amazon Ember&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; font-style: normal; font-variant-ligatures: normal; font-variant-caps: normal; font-weight: 400; letter-spacing: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: left; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); text-decoration-thickness: initial; text-decoration-style: initial; text-decoration-color: initial; display: inline !important; float: none;">In the year 1952, Kalu escaped Banjhan Kalan in Punjab’s Hoshiarpur for Bedford in the British Midlands, hoping to find a life of dignity that he had be</span><span style="color: rgb(15, 17, 17); font-family: &quot;Amazon Ember&quot;, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;">en denied because of his caste. He was in his late teens and had grown up believing in Sikhism’s tenet of equality preached by Guru Nanak and Ravidas, a principle the villagers never sincerely practised. They had maimed his father, accusing him of stealing a zamindar’s ox; they had thrown father and son out of a Quit India rally; they had mercilessly thrashed young Kalu himself for daring to enter a temple. He had never been allowed to forget—even by his schoolmates—that he was a Chamar, destined to skin dead cattle like his ancestors.</span><br></p>

NaCoHuS - A Novel

₹351.12 M.R.P.:₹ 399.00 You Save: ₹47.88  (12.00% OFF)
<p>Suket, Raghu and Shams are no strangers to taking on powerful political interests. They’ve never shied away from speaking their minds, with words or on the streets. And they’re used to a few bones being broken every now and then for it.</p><p>But something feels wrong about the state of affairs in the country now which they can’t quite put their finger on. Increasingly hard living conditions are met with breathless praise for the great work of development by the government. A politics of identity—of the religious kind—has all but replaced the pursuit of social justice. And people’s sentiments are so easily hurt that just about any divergent word you speak may bring a mob to your door. What has gone so wrong? Why does it feel like the entire nation has been lobotomized?</p><p>There are days when the three friends think they are close to an answer. But they have no idea how little they know.</p><p>In any case, their time’s up. They’re going to find out tonight. The National Commission for Hurt Sentiments is bringing them in for a ‘friendly interaction’.</p>

OLD TREES HAVE SECRETS

₹220.00 M.R.P.:₹ 250.00 You Save: ₹30.00  (12.00% OFF)

THE ADVENTURES OF SIRDAR - THE CHIEF OF THE HERD

₹220.00 M.R.P.:₹ 250.00 You Save: ₹30.00  (12.00% OFF)
<div>THE ADVENTURES OF SIRDAR - THE CHIEF OF THE HERD</div><div><br></div>

Unflattening

₹449.25 M.R.P.:₹ 599.00 You Save: ₹149.75  (25.00% OFF)
The primacy of words over images has deep roots in Western culture. But what if the two are inextricably linked, equal partners in meaning-making? Written and drawn entirely as comics, Unflattening is an experiment in visual thinking. Nick Sousanis defies conventional forms of scholarly discourse to offer readers both a stunning work of graphic art and a serious inquiry into the ways humans construct knowledge. Unflattening is an insurrection against the fixed viewpoint. Weaving together diverse ways of seeing drawn from science, philosophy, art, literature, and mythology, it uses the collage-like capacity of comics to show that perception is always an active process of incorporating and reevaluating different vantage points. While its vibrant, constantly morphing images occasionally serve as illustrations of text, they more often connect in nonlinear fashion to other visual references throughout the book. They become allusions, allegories, and motifs, pitting realism against abstraction and making us aware that more meets the eye than is presented on the page. In its graphic innovations and restless shape-shifting, Unflattening is meant to counteract the type of narrow, rigid thinking that Sousanis calls “flatness.” Just as the two-dimensional inhabitants of Edwin A. Abbott’s novella Flatland could not fathom the concept of “upwards,” Sousanis says, we are often unable to see past the boundaries of our current frame of mind. Fusing words and images to produce new forms of knowledge, Unflattening teaches us how to access modes of understanding beyond what we normally apprehend.

The Short Stories Of Oscar Wilde

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“I cannot think other than in stories,” Oscar Wilde once confessed to his friend André Gide. In this new selection of his short fiction, Wilde’s gifts as a storyteller are on full display, accompanied by informative facing-page annotations from Wilde biographer and scholar Nicholas Frankel. A wide-ranging introduction brings readers into the world from which the author drew inspiration. Each story in the collection brims with Wilde’s trademark wit, style, and sharp social criticism. Many are reputed to have been written for children, although Wilde insisted this was not true and that his stories would appeal to all “those who have kept the childlike faculties of wonder and joy.” “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime” stands alongside Wilde’s comic masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest, while other stories—including “The Happy Prince,” the tale of a young ruler who had never known sorrow, and “The Nightingale and the Rose,” the story of a nightingale who sacrifices herself for true love—embrace the theme of tragic, forbidden love and are driven by an undercurrent of seriousness, even despair, at the repressive social and sexual values of Wilde’s day. Like his later writings, Wilde’s stories are a sweeping indictment of the society that would imprison him for his homosexuality in 1895, five years before his death at the age of forty-six. Published here in the form in which Victorian readers first encountered them, Wilde’s short stories contain much that appeals to modern readers of vastly different ages and temperaments. They are the perfect distillation of one of the Victorian era’s most remarkable writers.

CIU

₹327.18 M.R.P.:₹ 399.00 You Save: ₹71.82  (18.00% OFF)
<p>"A furore erupts across India when explosives are found outside Kuberia, the house of Asia’s richest man, Kuber. Assistant Police Inspector Yatin Sathe, the controversial head of CIU of the Mumbai Police, who handles all high-profile cases, becomes the chief investigation officer of this case as well. Then the truth comes to light that Yatin Sathe had planted the explosive-laden Scorpio outside Kuberia and is now the investigating officer of that very same case.</p><p>What made Sathe plant the explosives? What role did the state government have in it? Who will emerge victorious in this tussle of Centre vs state politics? Who will turn out to be the dirtiest player and the real facilitator of all the dirty games? Who will be the biggest ‘criminal in uniform’?"</p>

Marquez, Ems, Gulam And Others

₹327.18 M.R.P.:₹ 399.00 You Save: ₹71.82  (18.00% OFF)
<p>"‘No matter which story I say is true, you will still believe only the version that you choose to.’</p><p>A young journalist in Kerala who wakes up to find he’s become Gabriel García Márquez…</p><p>A one-time zookeeper in search of a lost tiger cub in a war-torn Arab city…</p><p>A man in a Maharashtra village who must keep thieving because of his caste…</p><p>Featuring JCB Prize-winning author Benyamin’s finest short fiction, Márquez, EMS, Gulam and Others brings together people, places, lives and times. Translated brilliantly by Swarup B.R., these stories unravel, with deep sensitivity, the human condition across fault lines of class, caste, colour and country, of illusion and reality. They make you ponder about the world we live in, the people who inhabit it, the borders separating us – and the truths and lies we tell ourselves and others."</p>